This dissertation presents a qualitative study that features in-depth interviews conducted in homes and the application of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to understand the discourses of Hispanic parents. Observing moments of dialogue between parents and children who participated in some interviews served to understand how parents attempted to influence their children's development of beliefs and values about language and identity. The study examined transcripts of narratives produced by Hispanic parents in 12 families in Arizona and Iowa, most of them immigrants from Mexico whose children were attending primary grades in two public schools. The purpose of the study was to understand the ideological dimensions of parental involvement in education and their socialization practices.The theoretical framework can be described as a sociocultural approach to family, identity and ideology, combined with a critical perspective on language socialization. This sociocultural framework is influenced by Vygotsky's (1927/1997) cultural-historical theory, which provided the lens to look at the cognitive aspects involved in the reproduction of ideologies, and by diverse versions of CDA as formulated by other scholars, such as Fairclough (1995), Gee (2004), and van Dijk (1998). CDA was used to analyze conversational storytelling and argumentation about controversial topics such as bilingual education, the maintenance of Spanish as heritage language, identity, English-only instruction, and official English movements in US. This approach (CDA) was particularly useful to examine texts with reported speech to understand the representation of other people's discourses and of the groups they represent.The findings provide insights into experiences that would affect children's motivation to learn and use Spanish and English, paying attention to processes of ideological influence from diverse sources upon parents' and children's beliefs and attitudes toward those languages. This study has implications for language and educational policies because its findings inform educators about parents' experiences and their perspectives on the education of language minority students. The study is useful to understand not only the parents' perspectives on the education of Hispanic children, but also the ideological dimension of parental involvement in education, especially when the latter includes language socialization of their children towards promoting the development of bilingualism and biliteracy.

The spread of English in the world today is not only the result of colonizing campaigns (Canagarajah, 1999, 2005; Pennycook, 1994a, 1998a, 2000; Phillipson, 1992, 2000) but also of the compliance of the governments associated with the "expanding circle" (Kachru, 1986). In part, this compliance is a consequence of the different mechanisms of the circulation of discourse, in particular the idea that speaking English is a sine qua non condition to be a worldwide citizen. Colombia is a good example of this phenomenon, because its national government is implementing a National Bilingualism Project (PNB) where there is an explicit interest in the promotion of English over all other languages spoken in the country. This dissertation is a critical discourse analysis of the handbook Estándares básicos de competencias en lenguas extranjeras: Inglés. Formar en lenguas extranjeras, el reto" (Basic standards for competences in foreign languages: English. Teach in foreign languages: the challenge) published by the Ministry of Education of Colombia. This handbook is aimed at establishing the national standards for the teaching of English in Colombian public schools. The objective of the study is to offer an interpretation of the way in which bilingualism, English, and teachers are constructed through the language used in the handbook. The analysis of data follows Fairclough’s textual analysis and is supported by other written texts and informed by scholarly articles. The analysis of data shows that the official discourse creates a whole new meaning for “bilingualism” since it indexes exclusively the learning of English in Colombia. Along with this, the authors of the handbook perpetuate mainstream concepts and ideas about the symbolic power of English as the one and only necessary tool for academic and economic success. This is achieved by a redundant discourse on the neutrality of English on the one hand, and the benefits it brings to its speakers, on the other. In relation to the portrayal of teachers in this document, the data show that their role is either downplayed or made invisible, which also correlates with the low prestige that school teachers have in Colombia. The study leads to the conclusion that a document that contains national standards for the teaching of a language should include multiple voices where local knowledge gets the same recognition as global knowledge, and where the diversity of the country is represented, respected and promoted. In that way, official institutions would be legislating to benefit the majority of the population, and not the small number of elites of the country.

This dissertation describes an ethnographic case study of an elementary school in a border city in Southern Arizona. Its purpose is to explore teachers' professional lives at Cactus Elementary School (CES; pseudonym) through classroom observations, interviews and informal conversations. The majority of the fieldwork was conducted in the 2004-2005 school year. Teachers in Arizona have severe challenges compared with teachers in other states: lower expenditures on students, lower salaries, higher teacher-student ratios, and more English language learning students. Teachers at CES are faced with even more concerns, such as students' high mobility rate, the students' low socioeconomic status, and the students' language development. Furthermore, educational policies, such as NCLB, AZ LEARNS and the English-only policy set strict rules regarding language usage in classrooms and testing environments in schools. This study explores teachers' compassion and commitment to their profession. It also describes professional distress experienced by teachers as a result of national and state educational policies. In addition, it illustrates teachers' strategies for negotiating and developing everyday educational policies. This study questions whether school excellence and teacher quality can be measured solely by student test scores, and what "highly qualified teachers" means to students and the local community. At the same time, this dissertation emphasizes the power that local teachers and administrators have in negotiating and developing federal and state educational policies to meet their students' needs.

This dissertation presents the linguistic ecology of a Spanish-English, bilingual first grade classroom. The term linguistic ecology refers to the communicative behaviors of a group, as well as the physical and social contexts in which their communication occurs. In addition, a linguistic ecology includes the reciprocal influences of persons and environment on each other. Two questions guided this study: (1) How do the children interpret the roles of English and Spanish in their classroom environment? and (2) What resources, human and material, are made available to support the development of both languages in this bilingual classroom? Three over-arching categories were used to describe and analyze the linguistic ecology as viewed by the children: (1) the materials available in the school to support Spanish development; (2) the staffing for bilingual instruction; and (3) the dynamics of language use within the school, especially within one first-grade classroom. The results of this inquiry study strongly suggest that children of bilingual classrooms discern that (1) more time is devoted to English instruction; (2) more communication occurs in English; (3) few teachers have high levels of Spanish proficiency; (4) the personnel of bilingual schools utilize more English than Spanish in the school environment; and (5) Spanish language resource materials are fewer in number and often less appealing than their English-language counterparts. In effect, this case study documents and interprets the social and educational processes through which bilingual children in one U.S. school come to appreciate the prestige and power of English versus Spanish.

In 2007, the nation's Latino population was estimated at 45.5 million, or 15.1% of the 301.6 million total U.S. population. Latinos are the fastest-growing minority group, exceeding 500,000 in 16 states and representing the largest minority group in 20 states (Bernstein, 2008). The number of Latinos is projected to almost triple by 2050 and will represent about 60 percent of the country's growth with about 128 million Latinos, making up 29% of the total projected 440 million U.S. population (Passel, 2008).Latino's continued population growth makes their educational and occupational success, and their ability to self-sustain and to contribute to the greater good, essential to this nation's economy. Since education is the most critical component in the productivity and self-sufficiency of Latinos, it is important that their representation at all levels of education, including students, faculty and administrators increase along with the population growth. However, Latino representation in higher education has not grown proportionately to their increases in the U.S. population (Haro, 2003). Their representation and voice is lacking in the decision-making, top levels of administration, such as vice presidents, provosts, presidents, and chancellors.The under-representation of Latinas in higher education was the impetus for this study, to identify elements affecting their trajectory to the top ranks of administration, including embedded structures, institutionalized filters, and elements within the social selection process that affect their representation in the presidency and other top-level administrative posts of four-year institutions.Their narratives document Latinas' challenges and successes and validate the importance of culture and identity, and the fact that dual culturalism is a source of strength and not a deficit. This study acknowledges bias in higher education and the need to incorporate mentors, champions and other strategic measures to increase Latino representation in graduate programs, faculty and administration. These Latinas' ability to penetrate the adobe ceiling serves as a model and a "counterstory" for others who aspire to top administrative positions. Their insights and recommendations provide a valuable context to inform practice and research.

This study addresses the importance of committing to redesigning how world history is taught at the high school level. Presented is a model for curriculum reform that introduces an approach to teaching revolving around a thematic structure. The purpose of this redesigned thematic curriculum was to introduce an alternative approach to teaching that proceeded from a "critical perspective"--that is, one in which students did not so much learn discrete bits of knowledge but rather an orientation toward learning and thinking about history and its application to their lives. The means by which this was done was by teaching world history from an anthropological perspective. A perspective that made archaeological data more relevant in learning about the past. The study presents how such a model was created through its pilot application in a high school world history classroom. It is through the experimental application of the curriculum ideas in the high school classroom that I was able to determine the effectiveness of this curriculum by following how easily it could be used and how well students responded to it. Therefore, followed in the study was the evolution of the curriculum model's development as it was used in the pilot classroom. Thus, I was able to determine the extent of its success as a tool for teaching critically and for teaching from an anthropological perspective.

This dissertation examines the ways in which elementary school teachers view their job as political. I asked teachers to reflect on how they construct their identity, inside and outside the classroom; their relationship with the community, inside and outside the educational institution; and what behavior they consider political.Teachers' identity is constructed through personal ideology and through societal influences such as historical context and popular culture. Radical pedagogy and feminist theory are the ideological lenses by which I measured the attitudes of teachers.Using grounded theory I found that elementary school teachers characterize their actions as moral rather than political, what they called "doing the right thing." This research is important for looking at ways that political involvement on the part of teachers can be reframed as moral behavior. It includes implications for the relationship of elementary school teachers' pedagogy and a democratic society.

This dissertation explored the ways in which the everyday life practices of most urban Indians embodied the "modernization of tradition" (Hancock, 1999) and the role that media texts played in facilitating and encouraging this modernization. The research is based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted from June through December 2005, in the south-Indian city of Chennai, which has traditionally been regarded as a conservative city. Examining the Indian media as a discursive site where normative ideologies are not only constructed but also co-constructed, the study explored and examined how the discourses of tradition and modernity were contested in the south Indian media. It also identified and interpreted the ways in which dominant ideologies at the nexus of color/caste and gender/morality were negotiated by an urban city and its residents in the move towards modernity.Data included three different but inter-related sub-genres of print media texts -- visual images, textual advertisements, and news articles. The primary dataset of visual images consisted of 300 product advertisements culled from four, nationally available, English-language magazines gathered from the two genres of news and film. Textual data sets comprising the matrimonial advertisements and the news articles were gathered from the local editions of two nationally-available English-language newspapers. The broader ethnographic investigation included participant observations, individual formal and informal interviews, and focus group discussions with adult residents of Chennai. The data were analyzed using a multi-discursive and multidisciplinary approach. The analyses were informed by conceptual approaches which included: social semiotics and the multimodal theory of communication, genre analysis, critical discourse and feminist critical discourse analyses, and alternative modernities.In examining the media texts as the site where dominant sociocultural ideologies were being constantly configured and reconfigured, the analyses identified and examined the workings of three interconnected themes - fairness (in relation to skin color), gender, and morality. Through these themes, the dissertation examined the larger contestations and negotiations between the discourses of traditions and modernities as experienced by adult residents of urban Chennai. The discourses of identity construction and reconstruction were thus examined at the nexus of the individual self situated within the larger frame of the city.

The research is clear; given the opportunity to do so, children begin transacting with print at very young ages (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982). Deaf children with full access to language from birth frequently experience higher success rates in literacy acquisition (Kuntze, 1998). However, there remains a paucity of studies on how young Deaf children whose success with literacy development can be reasonably predicted, begin their journeys toward literacy. With the understanding that early literacy experiences significantly impact all children's literacy development (Bus, Van Ijzendoorn, & Pelligrini, 1995), it is important to have a clearer understanding of how Deaf children develop emergent literacy skills.This dissertation presents a year-long case study on four young Deaf children from native-ASL families who were immersed in literacy-rich environments and how they developed literacy skills in school and at home. In order to provide the fullest possible picture, parents, teachers and children were interviewed and observed. As literacy development does not happen in isolation; this dissertation provides information about the children's sociocultural context that included the literacy experiences and beliefs of the adult participants and the children's own experiences at home and in school. Artifacts including writing samples and data from an early literacy checklist were also collected to provide information about each child's individual written language development.The data were organized and analyzed based on salient themes and framed by socio-psycholinguistic studies on hearing children by researchers such as Dyson (1993), Ferreiro & Teberosky (1982), and Goodman (1996). Results show that with full access to language and opportunities to develop reading and writing abilities, Deaf children's emergent literacy development is highly similar to that of monolingual and bilingual hearing children with some characteristics unique to Deaf ASL-English bilinguals. The results of this dissertation study adds to the general body of knowledge of how children develop literacy abilities even when they do not have face-to-face communication in their literate language. The results also inform current practices in Deaf education and provide researchers, educators, and parents with a framework for understanding the critical role that language and communication play on Deaf children's literacy development.

This ethnographic study of language use and English language learners in Central Java, Indonesia examines globalization processes within and beyond language; processes of language shift and change in language ecologies; and critical and comprehensive approaches to the teaching of English around the world. From my position as teacher-researcher and insider-outsider in an undergraduate English Department and the community surrounding the university, I engaged in reflections with students and educators in examining local language ecologies; needs for and access to English language resources; and how English majors negotiated "double positionalities" as both members of a global community of English speakers and experts in local meaning systems within which English forms played a role. In order to understand English, language ecologies, and globalization in situ, I triangulated these findings with language and education policy creation and negotiation at micro-, meso- and macro- levels, (Blommaert, 2005; Hornberger & Hult, 2010; McCarty, 2011; Pennycook, 2001, 2010).Globalization is found to be part and parcel of the distribution of English around the world; however, English's presence around the world is understood to be just one manifestation of contemporary globalization. More salient are the internationalization of standards, global corporate and media flows of information, and access to educational and information resources. These are all regulated by the state which, while working to maintain an Indonesian identity, relegates local languages to peripheries in space and time, and regulates access to all language resources, creating an upward spiral of peripheralization wherein the levels of proficiency in local, national, and English languages represent access gained to state-provided educational resources.

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